A world through Chinese eyes
As ever, and with good reason, the state of our world and how we destroy it is high on the international agenda.
The Bird’s Nest strikes me as somewhat of an oxymoron in a city that is plagued by a dense smog; a symbol of recreation and nature in a home of industrial fervour. The eyes of the world are trained on Beijing as it celebrates fitness and health in a habitat that is the antithesis of such.
China is a place that fascinates me. A place that I would love to experience, and that I accept I only understand the tip of, in terms of history and culture.
In terms of travelling, issues that have been raised in the past few weeks, such as human rights and freedom of speech, only serve to make me want to find out more about the country, and understand what is going on. I don’t accept, for one second, that I am seeing the full picture, whilst digesting Western media that thrives on alarmism and urgency.
It was a friend of mine, currently at the Olympic Games, who told me that there are a lot of people who can’t understand the history.
It’s a country with little in the way of resources,” he told me, “and an immense population. It just wouldn’t have survived without some form of control.” Penny Kane covers the benefits of Mao in some detail in her book The Second Billion.
The point is, having not been to, I don’t know the half of it, and vagabonding is the pathway to discovery.
The thing that puts me off is the pollution. However vibrant the culture, I don’t think I could stay for long in a spot where every breath has me pondering the amount of toxins I have just inhaled. I struggle to stroll down a sidewalk where a cigarette is burning into lips ahead of me, so I dread to think what Beijing would do for me.
I do think that through the eyes of a vagabonder, the world becomes so much clearer. China has had a bad press, however successful their showpiece has been. I say, that before we criticise, let’s take some time to go and find out all the facts.
August 24th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
The pollution isn’t as bad as everyone makes out, at least I didn’t notice it so intensively when I was in Beijing and Shanghai last year. You shouldn’t let that deter you from discovering for yourself just how unmysterious this most mysterious of lands can really appear to the superficial visitor. It actually seems depressingly ordinary compared to even South East Asia, which really does seem, even on first acquaintance, rather exotic. But that’s just appearances. Socially, it’s pretty different from the West.
But I always pity Westerners who buy into this whole “fascinating” Orient business which is so hard to understand. In China, being too open about your emotions or intentions will make you ripe for exploitation – consequently, everyone wears masks. Emotions are carefully hidden. This is the origin of the “inscrutable Oriental” that has loomed so large in the imagination of the West. But it is all a big, and rather bad, joke, once you’ve lived in an Asian culture and realized what the origin and purpose of all this “mystery” and fascinating “inhscrutability” is – Essentially, a necessary survival strategy in a society where guile and deceit are prized qualities and fooling your fellow man is widely considered a sign of superior intellect. The Chinese are aghast at the idiocy of Westerners who openly admit what they feel and say what they think and think having a culture of deceit is a sign of superiority. I should know, I’m Chinese.
August 27th, 2008 at 2:54 am
I take the point about the pollution, which kind of spins off from the point I was trying to make – you don’t really know it unless you have tried it.
As for the cultural differences, again it is hard for a Westerner to understand all the concepts and ideologies without visiting the country for itself, and even then, you would be only touching the surface. The same goes for different Western countries, but countries that have a history based on the Mongols, or say the Ottoman Turks, are fantastically different from countries weened on European explorers. And then again, there are the Roman European countries, and the Greek etc etc. I think the bottom line is, get out and travel! I think anyone that is on this website agrees with that point?!